Does MPEG encoding take forever?

[Neptuna_Fish]

I'm interested in converting some episodes of different anime series that average around 178MBs in size (half hour)...They're all in AVI.

And what do I mean by "forever"?...24 hrs +

[Tom Lewandowski]

178 MB's? That's nothing. Shouldn't take long at all. Of course, it all depends what you're converting to... the speed of your computer... the encoding software...

A 20-minute AVI file (about 1.0 GB using my ASUS AVI codec), captured at 720x480, 29.97 fps, 48 kHz sound, takes about 3 hours to render on my P4 2.6 GHz PC using TMPGEnc Plus -- at a VBR (avg 5000 kbps) highest quality setting...along with some degree of noise reduction as well (which slows things down even more.) Can be done much quicker, depending on the quality settings.

[Josef K]

I'm interested in converting some episodes of different anime series that average around 178MBs in size (half hour)...They're all in AVI.

The first questions that spring to mind are:

• Are you converting just one or several in a batch?
  
  What encoder are you using?
  
  What are your system specs?

And what do I mean by "forever"?...24 hrs +

This depends on the answers to the above questions. If you're encoding just one alone and it's taking that long then you surely must have a problem somewhere. Though no-one can know unless your specs are known.

If you're batching using a slow encoder, then that might explain the long encoding duration - depending on how many you are converting in one go.

Other factors may come into it, such as filters you're applying, resizing, etc.

Would you mind going into your profile to update your Computer Details? It will save a lot of questions and time later on when you post in other threads.

[teegee420]

These kinds of questions are a little silly. Why don't you just try and find out?

[lordsmurf]

I convert video almost realtime (sometimes a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower). My PC specs in my profile.